[gfourfour]

Seattle/Washington has no elite or quasi-elite universities. That’s probably the #1 reason.

Compare it to Boston which is a similarly sized city.

Boston/New England has Harvard, MIT, BC, Tufts, Dartmouth, Amherst, Williams, Middlebury, Brown, etc. It’s the most educated region of the world with huge pool of founders and talent. Even though it’s not a tech focused place the way Seattle is it’s a better place to find young talented people willing to work for or start a new company.

[seanmcdirmid]

UW computer science is top 5 or top 10 depending on the US News year. It often is one spot behind UCB. But there are only so many UW CSE graduates (getting in is really hard), and most of them go to FAANGs these days. Ya, they are mostly working class and don’t have to economic cushion to go out and start a company. In comparison, Stanford, MIT, CMU have much better resources to take risks with.

[gfourfour]

Yeah UW is great but one university isn’t enough to sustain a world class talent pipeline

[seanmcdirmid]

I in rarely meet people from UW these days and I live near enough to campus in Ballard. People from all over wind up here for some reason, which is bad for traffic but whatever. So not much UW, but a-lot of IIT and Tsinghua. Seattle doesn’t need to grow its own talent, they come for the weather and mountains.

[gfourfour]

The mountains are awesome but idk how many people are moving to Seattle for the weather haha

[seanmcdirmid]

You would be surprised how many people can tolerate rain but not extreme heat or cold. Mild climate means our average temperature is 55 and deviates by 10 degrees either way.

[fingerlocks]

Rain in the city means snow in the mountains

[nickfromseattle]

How did you arrive at no elite universities is the cause of under investment relative to Seattle's status as a tech hub?

According to popular research, the best founders are older, as in 40s. [0]

Maybe older founders need/want to raise less?

[0] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wha...